Book Byte #294 "Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert
📣 Curious Quotes from the Author
“My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it.”
“Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.”
“The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.”
“If you are like most people, then like most people, you don't know you're like most people.”
“Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.”
“Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.”
“Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy.”
“Most of us appear to believe that we are more athletic, intelligent, organized, ethical, logical, interesting, open-minded, and healthy-not to mention more attractive-than the average person.”
“In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.”
“We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy... But our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn’t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan.”
📚 Cognition of the Book’s Big Idea
We base our decisions about the future on our recollections and imagination. However, we are unaware of how these processes are carried out by our brains. Because of this ignorance, we are more likely to make poor choices regarding the future. We will therefore frequently be displeased with the decisions we make.
Until Tomorrow,
Jason (Founder Club255)